We went up and down on the position along side with the backing tracks. We also worked on two sliding licks that can help us connect these two positions together. You can also see the chords that were used on top of these licks, relative to the starting and ending note of the licks:

What is important is that we covered 5 chords with these patterns: Am, C, Dm, Em, G. While going up & down the pattern, we made stops on each chord's root note. So when practicing these patterns, play a backing track (i.e. C major), and while playing the pattern, stop on every C note along the way. This will get yourself familiar and comfortable of finding/using that note later on when playing.

Lick 1 (Am)

Lick 2 (Em)

Sunday 4th of December 2011

This is the Session 2 of the Pentatonic Course, and we worked on two more pentatonic scale positions with the backing tracks (on top of C, Dm, Em, G and Am chords).

Position 1:

Position 2:

Let's put these patterns into context, and tighten them up a bit as well. Here are some of the things we we will work on today:

- starting from low tempos- starting and ending our sequences on a root note (of the chord in the backing) and making a stop on a root note of the chord along the way- increasing speed gradually- covering position connections with slides

Sunday 11th of December 2011

For today's (final) pentatonic session 3, we go through the last position that we have left - position 3 of the Am pentatonic scale. We will practice this position up and down following the root notes of the chords playing in the background.

For the second part of the chat, we will try to connect different positions together, but again with using the notes in context, not just playing randomly. These sliding connections are extremely important as they provide foundation for moving horizontally across the neck, and "breaking out of the box". Here are the essential 4 slide connections we will go through:

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

Example 4:

As with up & down sequences on the boxes themselves, here we will also start the sliding sequences on the root note (of a chord in the backing track), and end the sequence on the root note. Find the root notes in the patterns, and form the sequences according to backing track you are playing with.

This recap is excellent and is really helpful.Just yesterday I was trying to review the last few sessions with my notes.Must admit, yours are definitely better.I love the addition of the links and backing tracks you provided.

When we look back, we see a nice progression here.I think I am improving both my skills and understanding of application of scales.

I wish one day I'll be moving around the neck like you do (maybe just a wish, but we're allowed to dream here right!)

Anyhow, the scale generator of GMC is really a superb tool for all of us. Definitely worth the investment. It is also unique to GMC.I have seen books and other sites that attempt to do this but the GMC one is the one!

Again many thanks for taking the time to provide these summaries.Your dedication to this site and Blues is not going unnoticed.You deserve the Gold Guitar Award of the year!Keep bluesing man. You're the Blues Man!

In the last couple of weeks we went trough all boxes of the pentatonic scale (check out content above for that course), and here we will add one more note to that scale and get 5 positions of a blues scale. They are very similar to pentatonic ones, but should be rehearsed nonetheless, because we have to feel equally comfortable in every position in order to become proficient on the fretboard.

These are the positions that we will cover during this week:

Am blues scale position 4:

Am blues scale position 5:

Am blues scale position 1:

Am blues scale position 2:

Am blues scale position 3:

Blues is all about I - IV - V progression. These roman numerals ( I - IV - V) stand for chords. We have 3 chords in the blues progression, first, fourth and fifth chord. This means we will use first, fourth and fifth note of the major scale. This blues is in the Key of A, so first chord is A, fourth chord is D, and fifth chord is E. We will have to practice with these chords in order to fully understand how blues improvisation works. Don't worry if you aren't too familiar with the concepts of I - IV - V theory. Our main goal is to get to know the patterns and practice them with chords. Rest will come later during the course.

For the assignment, go up and down the patterns, and follow these guidelines:

1. Use the pattern, but start and end the sequence on the note, which corresponds to the root name of a chord (i.e. over A chord backing, start from A and end on A, over D chord backing start on D and end on D, over E chord backing start on E and end on E)2. Use free player AIMP to speed up or slow down these tracks as you are practicing them3. Once you feel comfortable with starting and ending on A, D and E notes, use the backing where you have them combined and try to match the notes of the chords as they come into play (trickier then it might seem, but you will love the results )4. Record some of the patterns you went through, and how you followed the chords, and post them here for feedback.

Feel free to send your takes during the week, but also be aware that we will go through complete Session 1 material on Sunday's video chat (18th of December)!

Session 2 assignment: (25.12.2011)

For session 2, we have one important aspect of blues: mixing major and minor pentatonic. In order to to that, we have to learn to superimpose these two scales on top of each other on the fretboard. Let's start easy, with one position first. We need to superimpose A minor pentatonic box 1, with A major pentatonic box 1:

A minor pentatonic box 1:

A major pentatonic box 1:

In blues, the clash of these two scales over major harmony is creating the dissonance that we usually refer as "bluesy sounding" line. On the next chat we will go through some exercises of playing these two boxes, following roots inside them, and trying to use them together in our blues solo.

During this week, you can work on these patterns in this order:

- play around with these two patterns over single-chord backing tracks - try to learn and follow the root notes within them over single-chord backing tracks- try to play roots only with the 12 bar blues progression (3 chords combined)- try to play lines within each scale separately, that follow the roots over 12 bar blues track- try to combine two patterns together, and play lines that follow the roots over 12 bar blues track

Feel free to send your takes during the week, but also be aware that we will go through complete Session 2 material on Sunday's video chat (25th of December)! You can also find the Guitar Pro file of the blues solo that we did on the video chat in the attachment section.

Session 3 assignment: (01.01.2012)

For the Session 3 we have vibrato/bending study. This is very important technique in blues, and we will cover lots of different situations where you need to do bending/vibrato. Unfortunately, it's very hard to display this with tabs/backing tracks, so I will reserve this session for video chat, held on 1st of January. I hope you won't be tired from New Year's Eve, to make it on this chat!

OK, session 3 is finished, and on the 1st January video chat, we talked about several important bend & vibrato techniques in blues (and in general):

Bending is a technique where we fret the note, and (while fretting) pull the string upwards on downwards:

- When I'm bending with the index finger, I usually pull my string downwards on all strings but B and high E. - When I'm bending with all other fingers, I'm usually bending my strings upwards on all situations, except when on strings A and low E.

Why? Because there simply isn't room for bending more, the string can go over the neck's edge.

Vibrato is a complex-motion technique, consisting out of multiple consecutive bigger or smaller bends. There are numerous ways you can do a vibrato:

- up & down nudging with the wrist fixed, and elbow going up and down (ala Eric Clapton, or more aggressive approach found at SRV)- up & down nudging with small wrist movement and elbow rotating (ala BB King)- Circular movement, combining left&right and up&down nudging of the note (ala Steve Vai)

All these techniques are good in their own respective way, and these players developed them to extreme levels. By practicing your vibrato and bending, you develop your expression, but your tone as well. You learn when to stop on the note to do a vibrato or bend, give your notes glissando quality, and improve your tone.

Vibrato and bending should be practiced slowly with the metronome or backing track, as demonstrated in the video chat! Here is one cool exercise that you can do, that will greatly help you achieve desired quality of the bends:

- Take Am blues scale as a reference and practice slowly bending with the backing track- Bend each note out of a scale, to the next note in line (i.e. bend D to D# and release, and repeat that motion, then bend D to E and release etc..)- Take it very slowly, using quarter notes, and then move one to faster consecutive bends- Always make sure you are in correct pitch (that you reached the desired bended note)- Repeat these steps for each of the fingers

If you take time to do this exercises system, your bending and vibrato techniques will be greatly improved. Even if you do it on several important notes (such as bends to root, or D-D#, and D-E), it will already be a major improvement.

Am blues scale:

Another important thing that we discussed are double stop bends/vibratos. These are very cool sounding, often emulating slide tone, and very popular in blues. Try to go through this cool example:

For the last session of the Blues Improvisation Course, we need to see how the legends did it This should be fun, so let's go through style studies a bit. For this session, there is one assignment to go through before the next video chat and that is, to watch all the examples bellow, and try to spot important characteristics of each of the players.

Clapton's licks (special attention at the beginning, you can hear lots of licks that make sense on their own without the band even)

In tomorrows session, we are going to have a look at some of the most essential Pentatonic runs that can work over major and minor pentatonic. These runs are based on straight pentatonic scale, and use several positions at the time (all 5 of them).

We will work on two of these runs during the session, one major pentatonic, and one minor pentatonic: within the pattern bellow:

First one is minor pentatonic, and we will practice in Eminor (check the tab, guitar pro file and backing track bellow).Second one is G major pentatonic (same pattern, but G major backing, and we start from different note)

Goal of this lesson is to grasp a full view on the pentatonic pattern. This pattern should be looked as a whole, not as 5 separate boxes, and this is one of the ways to connect them. The goal is also to learn to start & stop on the root note of the chord being played in the background, which is very important for soloing.

Go through these a bit with the backing tracks (you can find them bellow), and join us on video chat session on Sunday! (here's the countdown timer for the video chat that will adapt to your time zone)

During these exercises, special attention will be focused on:

- the way you pick- micropauses between the notes- your position while practicing- picking dynamic range

Excellent lesson today Ivan. Thanks again.This session showed us how we can easily create our own exercise when learning a new scale.Considering the whole fretboard as a playground with all positions of the scale.We can focus on just a few string at a time, 2 or 3 etc.The idea of working with the metronome, increasing gradually the speed, really helps the learning curve.Gonna work on this this week. Need to increase my speed and memory.Getting there one day at a time. (So I hope!)

For today's chat we have something that should be interesting to all who would like to achieve better string skipping motion with their pick. It's a very useful exercises, and one that can help you get that eric johnson vibe too

Here's a countdown timer to the chat that will adapt to your time zone. See you there!

Today we will cover sliding exercises! These two are the most basic ones that every player should learn, and we will mostly practice sliding technique with these, using alternate picking.

Why are we practicing this? How can we improve with this? Answer is this:

- we learn to break out of the box- we will learn starting and ending note of the exercises (and keeping it in context with the backing track)- we learn to slide with precision and speed

Join us!

You can find backing tracks bellow to jam along. For more tempos, I advise that you download free player called AIMP. It has a great tempo (and pitch) shifting feature, and I use it for practice all the time. It's very simple to use, so download and install to make the best out of the backings.

There are three backing tracks available: Em, G major and combined Em-G (4 bars each). All tracks are 120bpm tempo. If you guys need slower then that, feel free to let me know!

In the last couple of weeks we went trough all boxes of the pentatonic scale (check out content above for that course), and here we will add one more note to that scale and get 5 positions of a blues scale. They are very similar to pentatonic ones, but should be rehearsed nonetheless, because we have to feel equally comfortable in every position in order to become proficient on the fretboard.

These are the positions that we will cover during this week:

Am blues scale position 4:

Am blues scale position 5:

Am blues scale position 1:

Am blues scale position 2:

Am blues scale position 3:

Blues is all about I - IV - V progression. These roman numerals ( I - IV - V) stand for chords. We have 3 chords in the blues progression, first, fourth and fifth chord. This means we will use first, fourth and fifth note of the major scale. This blues is in the Key of A, so first chord is A, fourth chord is D, and fifth chord is E. We will have to practice with these chords in order to fully understand how blues improvisation works. Don't worry if you aren't too familiar with the concepts of I - IV - V theory. Our main goal is to get to know the patterns and practice them with chords. Rest will come later during the course.

For the assignment, go up and down the patterns, and follow these guidelines:

1. Use the pattern, but start and end the sequence on the note, which corresponds to the root name of a chord (i.e. over A chord backing, start from A and end on A, over D chord backing start on D and end on D, over E chord backing start on E and end on E)2. Use free player AIMP to speed up or slow down these tracks as you are practicing them3. Once you feel comfortable with starting and ending on A, D and E notes, use the backing where you have them combined and try to match the notes of the chords as they come into play (trickier then it might seem, but you will love the results )4. Record some of the patterns you went through, and how you followed the chords, and post them here for feedback.

Feel free to send your takes during the week, but also be aware that we will go through complete Session 1 material on Sunday's video chat (18th of December)!

Session 2 assignment: (25.12.2011)

For session 2, we have one important aspect of blues: mixing major and minor pentatonic. In order to to that, we have to learn to superimpose these two scales on top of each other on the fretboard. Let's start easy, with one position first. We need to superimpose A minor pentatonic box 1, with A major pentatonic box 1:

A minor pentatonic box 1:

A major pentatonic box 1:

In blues, the clash of these two scales over major harmony is creating the dissonance that we usually refer as "bluesy sounding" line. On the next chat we will go through some exercises of playing these two boxes, following roots inside them, and trying to use them together in our blues solo.

During this week, you can work on these patterns in this order:

- play around with these two patterns over single-chord backing tracks - try to learn and follow the root notes within them over single-chord backing tracks- try to play roots only with the 12 bar blues progression (3 chords combined)- try to play lines within each scale separately, that follow the roots over 12 bar blues track- try to combine two patterns together, and play lines that follow the roots over 12 bar blues track

Feel free to send your takes during the week, but also be aware that we will go through complete Session 2 material on Sunday's video chat (25th of December)! You can also find the Guitar Pro file of the blues solo that we did on the video chat in the attachment section.

Session 3 assignment: (01.01.2012)

For the Session 3 we have vibrato/bending study. This is very important technique in blues, and we will cover lots of different situations where you need to do bending/vibrato. Unfortunately, it's very hard to display this with tabs/backing tracks, so I will reserve this session for video chat, held on 1st of January. I hope you won't be tired from New Year's Eve, to make it on this chat!

OK, session 3 is finished, and on the 1st January video chat, we talked about several important bend & vibrato techniques in blues (and in general):

Bending is a technique where we fret the note, and (while fretting) pull the string upwards on downwards:

- When I'm bending with the index finger, I usually pull my string downwards on all strings but B and high E. - When I'm bending with all other fingers, I'm usually bending my strings upwards on all situations, except when on strings A and low E.

Why? Because there simply isn't room for bending more, the string can go over the neck's edge.

Vibrato is a complex-motion technique, consisting out of multiple consecutive bigger or smaller bends. There are numerous ways you can do a vibrato:

- up & down nudging with the wrist fixed, and elbow going up and down (ala Eric Clapton, or more aggressive approach found at SRV)- up & down nudging with small wrist movement and elbow rotating (ala BB King)- Circular movement, combining left&right and up&down nudging of the note (ala Steve Vai)

All these techniques are good in their own respective way, and these players developed them to extreme levels. By practicing your vibrato and bending, you develop your expression, but your tone as well. You learn when to stop on the note to do a vibrato or bend, give your notes glissando quality, and improve your tone.

Vibrato and bending should be practiced slowly with the metronome or backing track, as demonstrated in the video chat! Here is one cool exercise that you can do, that will greatly help you achieve desired quality of the bends:

- Take Am blues scale as a reference and practice slowly bending with the backing track- Bend each note out of a scale, to the next note in line (i.e. bend D to D# and release, and repeat that motion, then bend D to E and release etc..)- Take it very slowly, using quarter notes, and then move one to faster consecutive bends- Always make sure you are in correct pitch (that you reached the desired bended note)- Repeat these steps for each of the fingers

If you take time to do this exercises system, your bending and vibrato techniques will be greatly improved. Even if you do it on several important notes (such as bends to root, or D-D#, and D-E), it will already be a major improvement.

Am blues scale:

Another important thing that we discussed are double stop bends/vibratos. These are very cool sounding, often emulating slide tone, and very popular in blues. Try to go through this cool example:

For the last session of the Blues Improvisation Course, we need to see how the legends did it This should be fun, so let's go through style studies a bit. For this session, there is one assignment to go through before the next video chat and that is, to watch all the examples bellow, and try to spot important characteristics of each of the players.

Clapton's licks (special attention at the beginning, you can hear lots of licks that make sense on their own without the band even)

I MAY be miss-understanding something, so I want to make sure the correct way to practice/proceed.

You show the 5 Am Pentatonic positions(boxes). You mention practicing going up and down these positions, (on top of C, Dm, Em, G and Am chords), starting and stopping on the root notes of the chord in the backing track, and you show how to connect the positions.

Am Pentatonic over Dm, Em, G or even F backing tracks sound like crap:) There are only a couple of notes that sound OK. The root and maybe one or two other ones.......so, I'm wondering if you mean I should be playing the 5 Dm Pentatonic positions over Dm and/or F backing tracks, Em over Em and/or G etc.

Thanks again for your help and clarification,

mdyerlrb

Ivan,

Please disregard my 1st attempt at "replying" on this forum. I messed up!!

First of all, thank you for spending the time to help out fellow guitarists. Much appreciated.

I MAY be miss-understanding something, so I want to make sure the correct way to practice/proceed.

You show the 5 Am Pentatonic positions(boxes). You mention practicing going up and down these positions, (on top of C, Dm, Em, G and Am chords), starting and stopping on the root notes of the chord in the backing track, and you show how to connect the positions.

Am Pentatonic over Dm, Em, G or even F backing tracks sound like crap:) There are only a couple of notes that sound OK. The root and maybe one or two other ones.......so, I'm wondering if you mean I should be playing the 5 Dm Pentatonic positions over Dm and/or F backing tracks, Em over Em and/or G etc.